There is a man standing by Janine's things with a scowl on his face when she returns to the laundromat. Her load has been done for more than twenty minutes, and the lineup of people waiting for machines has become an untidy sprawl across the front of the room. People lean on walls and gaze out the windows, and a mother has perched her two children on the nearest dryer. In this weather, nobody wants to be outside.

Janine ignores the scowling man and retrieves her load. It will take another half-hour to dry, enough time to return to the square, hear the bell again, and come back. She has more walking to do yet today, though, and her legs are already feeling the strain of dragging her feet through the snow. She will just have to be satisfied with taking the long route back from the restaurant.

Staying indoors means bearing the more and less covert stares of people living and dead, so she returns to the street as soon as the dryer is humming. The wind has eased since the morning, and most snow in the air now comes from thick puffs blown off the city's rooftops by erratic breezes. Old houses seem to lean into the street as Janine walks up it, not intending to go far.

There are more people outside now. Younger children throw snowballs. Older children shovel their relatives' walkways in a futile attempt to best the blowing snow. A city man with bag over his shoulder tramps towards the city square. Janine catches a glimpse of his load through a transparent side panel. Replacement street-lamp bulbs. She has often wondered why the city does not just switch to modern lightbulbs and be done with the issue of them always burning out. The current mayor went to great lengths to restore the old street lamps when he came into office. He said it was good for tourism. He might be right, but Janine has walked home too many times in the darkness left behind by dead street lamps.

A shout draws her attention. A richly attired couple leaps back from the front of an antiques shop as though chased by a snake. Janine has to walk a few meters before the sky's reflection on the shop window clears enough for her to see inside. Behind the glass, an ornate side table has begun to move.

The couple hurries up the street as fast as the woman's impractical heels allow. They cannot see the ghost, Janine can already tell. Their backward glances fixate on the fluttering paper sign pinned to the shop door.

The ghost is further inside.

Janine stops on the sidewalk opposite the shop. Already, the street has emptied with near-miraculous alacrity. She feels more ghost eyes on her back, but does not turn around.

The ghost in the shop is a middle-aged woman, stockier than most and dressed in a carpenter's apron. Her hair is done up in a tidy bun, at odds with the wild look in her eyes. She is pushing furniture. Back and forth, until the old wooden articles crash into one another and the shop's other contents begin to fall prey. A table and a dresser collide with a sickening crunch. A child's chair and a lamp topple from the window display, one taking a stand of jewelery with it. A glass-fronted cabinet falls open. Its contents cascade to the floor, where knickknacks roll and china shatters.

A police siren sounds from up the street. A cruiser rolls to a halt in front of the shop only moments later, its sleek doors discharging officers in dark purple uniform. Janine recognizes them by the colour. These are from the paranormal special forces, a division run ragged around the city in recent years, even as its size has been doubled, then doubled again.

One officer instructs Janine to stand back, though she knows the ghost won't hurt her even if it escapes. The other, a young black woman, darts into the shop with the efficiency of experience. She ducks tables and skirts shelves as she lays a trail of iron chain around the main room's perimeter. The ghost is still occupied. If she has noticed the officer, she doesn't care.

The officer is back out the door in the span of a minute. Now the ghost is contained. The other policewoman has already lit a salt smudge outside. When her colleague stands safe beside her, she lobs it through the door.

The smudge makes no smoke, so its impact takes another minute to become evident. The ghost slows. Soon enough, she stands still in the middle of the wrecked shop, arms slack and a lost look in her eyes. She cannot leave until they remove the chain. The two officers confer outside. Even with a ghost population an order of magnitude larger than it was two years ago, the paranormal task force has found no way to remove ghosts entirely. If this one has been subdued enough to wander the streets peaceably for another month, they can let her go. If not, sequestration may be the only option.

Janine's eyes wander the row of shops of which this one is a part. More than half are shuttered. She can feel from their energy that many have chains inside, circling whatever rooms serve as a prisons for the ghosts that caused their closure. She wonders how long their hold will last. Pure, naked iron may repel ghosts, but it does not repel the damp of winter, or the leak of unmaintained roofs.

Closed shops without chains swim with a different kind of energy. Here crowd the less unruly dead, seeking shelter from the cold, or a haunt they knew and loved in life. They pack so tightly into some buildings, it's no wonder the former business owners could no longer attract enough living clientele to stay afloat.

The bell tolls in the distance. Janine turns from the scene and retraces her steps up the street, leaving the police officers reeling in their chain.

The next hour of the day fades into mental obscurity. Janine's feet carry her to the restaurant where she used to work, where her boss sends an assistant to take her uniform off her hands with a cursory thanks that does not reach their eyes. Her own gaze lingers on the ghost family seated at one of the rickety tables. Three children, a mother, and a father. They are having a merrier time than the restaurant's other patrons.

The assistant is glad to see her go again.

Janine takes the long route back to the town square, arriving just before the hour. The sky is yellow again. It's a promise of more snow, and for once, she does not mind. She will not have to walk through it to the restaurant again.

The dancing woman is back beneath the bell tower. This time, though, she's not alone.

The city man Janine saw earlier is trying to shepherd the woman away from the gate in the fence that rings the tower. It's open—he must have opened it. The two lamps standing just inside must be the last pair on his route, for his bag lies on the ground nearby, gutted and slack. Janine can see only two bulbs left in it.

The old woman is not listening. She steps and spins serenely in front of the gate, obstructing the man's attempts to get past her. There is no other way through the fence. It was installed years ago to keep passersby from the tower base, which saw some of the highest ghost concentrations in the city at the time. It is too high to climb.

The woman's growing audience consists of more than just the living. Ghosts ring the rust-eaten fence and fan out across the square. They stand like the woman in the antiques shop did once subdued: arms hanging, faces staring ahead or slightly upturned. It is in moments like these that they truly look dead.

As the city man's frustration mounts, a ghost child steps forwards. The man must sense it, for he stutters back, eyes raking his surroundings uneasily. The old woman dips the child a bow. She is wearing a secret kind of smile: the kind one would expect from a grandmother who knows her grandchildren's crushes. The child slips past her and through the half-open gate. Murmurs ripple through the crowd as he disappears into the bell tower.

A ghost woman is next to approach. The old woman lets her by, too, colourful skirts swirling as she sways to a tune nobody else can hear. What she is doing is illegal. The fence keeps the living and dead alike from Old Saint Boniface's most treasured landmark, and with the number of rogue ghosts on the rise, it would only take one to inflict heavy damage on the inner workings of the clocks or the bell. When and how any given ghost turns to sabotage is no more predictable than the path of a snowflake's fall or the deterioration of a mind with dementia. But Janine knows the gathered crowd must hold at least half a dozen with the potential to snap.

Someone has called the police. The same cruiser Janine saw outside the antiques shop pulls up at the edge of the square. People move aside to let the policewomen through. The ghosts do not. Neither does the old woman, who carries on dancing even as she is handcuffed and led stiffly away.

The city man shuts the gate just as the bell tolls. The sound triggers a wave of motion among the dead. They sway forwards, some even falling a step or two towards the bell tower before catching themselves. They stand for another quarter hour before slowly dispersing and drifting away.

Janine walks home too absent to feel her aching feet. The memory of what she saw in the square turns over in her mind, a shifting mirage that catches on moments like silk snagged on wood. The old woman's smile. Her dance. The near-collective consciousness of the ghost crowd.

And the bell. Always the sound of the bell.

She would put it out of her mind just like every other problem she has ignored, deflected, or made someone else's responsibility. But this one makes her restless. She stops at a streetside vendor's cart to buy fries and a burger, adding food costs to her dwindling budget as she recalculates how long she will last without a job. She got discounted meals at the restaurant.

The new tally lasts two weeks. Appetite already wan, Janine nibbles at the fries until she gets home, then stares up at the front of the building, struck with a sudden and intense lack of desire to go in. She sits on the steps instead, waiting to see if the ghost boy across the street will pitch another rock at the street lamp in front of his former house. He never appears. As evening falls, she watches the lamps instead, flickering on one by one to cast halos in the new, softly falling snow.